have carried him so far, as to make him commence a filthy and impious poem, with an elaborate satire on the character and manners of his wife-from whom, even by his own confession, he has been separated only in consequence of his own cruel and heartless misconduct. It is in vain for Lord Byron to attempt in any way to justify his own behavior in that affair; and, now that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and reproach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be plainly told so by the general voice of his countrymen. It would not be an easy matter to persuade any Man, who has any knowledge of the nature of Woman, that a female such as Lord Byron has himself described his wife to be, would rashly, or hastily, or lightly, separate herself, from the love with which she had once been inspired for such a man as he is, or was. Had he not heaped insult upon insult, and scorn upon scornhad he not forced the iron of his contempt into her very soul there is no woman of delicacy and virtue, as he admitted Lady Byron to be, who would not have hoped all things and suffered all things from one, her love of whom must have been inwoven with so many exalting elements of delicious pride, and more delicious humility. To offend the love of such a woman was wrong but it might be forgiven; to desert her was unmanly -but he might have returned, and wiped for ever from her eyes the tears of her desertion;- but to injure, and to desert, and then to turn back and wound her widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold-blooded mockery- was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean. For impurities there might be some possibility of pardon, were they supposed to spring only from the reckless buoyancy of young blood and fiery passions; for impiety there might at least be pity, were it visible that the misery of the impious soul equalled its darkness; - but for offences such as this, which cannot proceed either from the madness of sudden impulse, or the bewildered agonies of doubt -but which speak the wilful and determined spite of an unrepenting, unsoftened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner-there can be neither pity nor pardon. Our knowledge that it is committed by one of the most powerful intellects our island ever has produced, lends intensity a thousand fold to the bitterness of our indignation. Every high thought that was ever kindled

in our breasts by the muse of Byron-every pure and lofty feeling that ever responded from within us to the sweep of his majestic inspirations- every remembered moment of admiration and enthusiasm, is up in arms against him. We look back with a mixture of wrath and scorn to the delight with which we suffered ourselves to be filled by one who, all the while he was furnishing us with delight, must, we cannot doubt it, have been. mocking us with a cruel mockery-less cruel only, because less peculiar, than that with which he has now turned him from the lurking-place of his selfish and polluted exile, to pour the piti. ful chalice of his contumely on the surrendered devotion of a virgin-bosom, and the holy hopes of the mother of his child. It is indeed a sad and an humiliating thing to know, that in the same year there proceeded from the same pen two productions, in all things so different, as the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold and this loathsome Don Juan.

"We have mentioned one, and, all will admit, the worst instance of the private malignity which has been embodied in so many passages of Don Juan; and we are quite sure, the lofty minded and virtuous men whom Lord Byron has debased hinself by insulting, will close the volume which contains their own injuries, with no feelings save those of pity for Him that has inflicted them, and for Her who partakes so largely in the same injuries."-[Aug. 1819.]

The previous "Testimonies" refer to the earlier most of them to the first two- Cantos of Don Juan. We now pass to critical observations on the Poem as a whole, and begin with the admonition addressed to Byron by Jeffrey in the 72d number of the Edinburgh Review.

XVII. JEFFREY.

"Lord Byron complains bitterly of the detraction by which he has been assailed- and intimates that his works have been reeived by the public with far less cordiality and favor than he

was entitled to expect. We are constrained to say that this appears to us a very extraordinary mistake. In the whole course of our experience, we cannot recollect a single author who has had so little reason to complain of his reception- to whose genius the public has been so early and so constantly just--to whose faults they have been so long and so signally indulgent. From the very first, he must have been aware that he offended the principles and shocked the prejudices of the majority, by his sentiments, as much as he delighted them by his talents. Yet there never was an author so universally and warmly applauded, so gently admonished so kindly entreated to look more heedfully to his opinions. He took the praise, as usual, and rejected the advice. As he grew in fame and authority, he aggravated all his offences clung more fondly to all he had been reproached with- and only took leave of Childe Harold to ally himself to Don Juan! That he has since been talked of, in public and in private, with less unmingled admiration that his name is now mentioned as often for censure as for praise and that the exultation with which his countrymen once hailed the greatest of our living poets, is now alloyed by the recollection of the tendency of his writings — is matter of notoriety to all the world; but matter of surprise, we should imagine, to nobody but Lord Byron himself.

"That the base and the bigoted - those whom he has darkened by his glory, spited by his talent, or mortified by his neglect have taken advantage of the prevailing disaffection, to vent their puny malice in silly nicknames and vulgar scurrility, is natural and true. But Lord Byron may depend upon it, that the dissatisfaction is not confined to them, and, indeed, that they would never have had the courage to assail one so immeasurably their superior, if he had not at once made himself vulnerable by his errors, and alienated his natural defenders by his obstinate adherence to them. We are not bigots, nor rival poets. We have not been detractors from Lord Byron's fame, nor the friends o. his detractors; and we tell him far more in sorrow than in anger that we verily believe the great body of the English nation the religious, the moral, and the candid part of it- consider the tendency of his writings to be immoral and pernicious-and look upon his perseverance in that strain of composition with

regret and reprehension. We ourselves are not easily startled, either by levity of temper, or boldness, or even rashness of remark; we are, moreover, most sincere admirers of Lord Byron's genius, and have always felt a pride and an interest in his fame. but we cannot dissent from the censure to which we have alluded; and shall endeavor to explain, in as few and as temperate words as possible, the grounds upon which we rest our con

currence.

"He has no priestlike cant or priestlike reviling to apprehend from us. We do not charge him with being either a disciple or an apostle of Satan; nor do we describe his poetry as a mere compound of blasphemy and obscenity. On the contrary, we are inclined to believe that he wishes well to the happiness of mankind - and are glad to testify, that his poems abound with sentiments of great dignity and tenderness, as well as passages of infinite sublimity and beauty. But their general tendency we believe to be in the highest degree pernicious; and we even think that it is chiefly by means of the fine and lofty sentiments they contain, that they acquire their most fatal power of corruption. This may sound at first, perhaps, like a paradox; but we are mistaken if we shall not make it intelligible enough in the end.

"We think there are indecencies and indelicacies, seductive descriptions and profligate representations, which are extremely reprehensible; and also audacious speculations, and erroneous and uncharitable assertions, equally indefensible. But if these had stood alone, and if the whole body of his works had been made up of gaudy ribaldry and flashy scepticism, the mischief, we think, would have been much less than it is. He is not more obscene, perhaps, than Dryden or Prior, and other classical and pardoned writers; nor is there any passage in the history even of Don Juan so degrading as Tom Jones's affair with Lady Bellaston. It is no doubt a wretched apology for the indecencies of a man of genius, that equal indecencies have been forgiven to his predecessors: but the precedent of lenity might have been followed; and we might have passed both the levity and the voluptuousness -the dangerous warmth of his romantic situations, and the scandal of his cold-blooded dissipation. It might not have been so easy to get over his dogmatic scepticism - his hardhearted maxims of misanthropy - his cold-blooded and eager

expositions of the non-existence of virtue and honor. Even this, however, might have been comparatively harmless, if it had not been accompanied by that which may look, at first sight, as a palliation the frequent presentment of the most touching pictures of tenderness, generosity, and faith.

"The charge we bring against Lord Byron in short is, that his writings have a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue and to make all enthusiasm and constancy of affection ridiculous; and that this is effected, not merely by direct maxims and examples, of an imposing or seducing kind, but by the constant exhibition of the most profligate heartlessness in the persons of those who had been transiently represented as actuated by the purest and most exalted emotions and in the lessons of that very teacher who had been, but a moment before, so beautifully pathetic in the expression of the loftiest conceptions. "This is the charge which we bring against Lord Byron. We say that, under some strange misapprehension as to the truth, and the duty of proclaiming it, he has exerted all the powers of his powerful mind to convince his readers, both directly and indirectly, that all ennobling pursuits, and disinterested virtues, are mere deceits or illusions-hollow and despicable mockeries for the most part, and, at best, but laborious follies. Love, patriotism, valor, devotion, constancy, ambition - all are to be laughed at, disbelieved in, and despised! And nothing is really good, so far as we can gather, but a succession of dangers to stir the blood, and of banquets and intrigues to soothe it again! If this doctrine stood alone, with its examples, it would revolt, we believe, more than it would seduce:- but the author of it has the unlucky gift of personating all those sweet and lofty illusions, and that with such grace and force and truth to nature, that it is impossible not to suppose, for the time, that he is among the most devoted of their votaries till he casts off the character with a jerk-and, the moment after he has moved and exalted us to the very height of our conception, resumes his mockery at all things serious or sublime and lets us down at once on some coarse joke, hard-hearted sarcasm, or fierce and reentless personality as if on purpose to show

'Whoe'er was edified, himself was not '